The Vergecast - It's not your job to fix the internet

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Enshittification. It's fun to say, hard to spell, and a useful descriptor of exactly how the internet has gone wrong. Cory Doctorow, the author and activist who coined the term a few years ago, recently published a book on the subject, called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. He was on Decoder a few weeks ago to explain what happened, and joins The Vergecast this week to help us figure out what to do about it. Can we, as regular people on the internet, help to de-enshittify the place? What responsibility do we have, and what kinds of choices should we be making? Cory has lots of thoughts on whether you can shop your way out of a monopoly, and what it really takes to enact structural change online. Further reading: Cory Doctorow on Decoder Read Cory's book, Enshittification Cory's last Vergecast appearance From Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born FTC files a massive antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Birchcast, the flagship podcast, of transferring all value to your business customers. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here in my almost entirely empty basement. Right behind me is where my desk used to be, but it's all gone. This is all good news. We're moving this weekend. It's all very exciting. But I made the very stupid mistake of taking all of my audio equipment, all of my lights, my computer, my desk chair, everything out of this room before I recorded this. So now I sit on the floor and I talk into my MacBook.

Air, which is currently sitting on a couch cushion. This is, this is the life that I lead. Thank you, by the way, Apple, for making the MacBook Air microphones pretty good now. So hopefully this will sound okay. And by the way, if you're like, oh, gosh, David, not only does the MacBook Air microphone sound pretty good, it makes your voice sound like deeper and more powerful than normal. Alas, no, I just have a cold, but I'll be over that soon. Anyway, we're not here to talk about any of that. We're here for a conversation that I had a couple of weeks ago with Corey Doctoro. Corey is one of those people who has been writing about and thinking about the internet for decades. He was at Boing Boing where I read him for a long time. He's done a lot of

work at the EFF about internet policy and that kind of thing. And a couple of years ago, he coined a term called Inshitification, which describes basically the way that technology companies and the products that they make have systematically gotten worse. He also wrote a book called Inshittification. It's out now. It's fabulous. You should read it. And we're We're going to talk to him. We did this interview and I was like, I don't know what we're going to make of this. And I enjoyed talking to him so much about what happened and what we do about it that I just figure we're just going to run it. I think you'll like it too.

All that is coming up in just a sec. This is the first gas. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually

builds it on your company's data and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion?

If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic issues. ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. So let me just set up the conversation I'm about to have with Corey. So again, in shitification essentially describes this process by which good companies and good

products go bad. And you'll hear him describe kind of the basic tenets of that at the very beginning. But it's essentially a company builds a good. product that a lot of people like. And then when it has that good product that a lot of people like, it starts to shift value away from users and towards business clients. Right. So if you're Google, instead of having a great search engine that gives people exactly what they want, you start to turn knobs that make your advertisers more money. And then the third step is that you eventually take all of that value for yourself. So if you're Amazon, instead of being good to your buyers or

good to your sellers, ideally you'd do both, right? But the theory is you do one. But the theory is you do one, one and then the other, you're just good to yourself. And you find ways to squeeze both sides of the equation, all to deliver value to yourself. Corey was just on Decoder or other podcasts a couple of weeks ago describing how all of this works, how we got here, and why this all happened. It's a fabulous interview and you should go listen to it. I think you can listen to it after you listen to this. So it's not like you have to pause and go listen to that. But it's a really good companion to the conversation we're about to have because I wanted to talk about something different with Corey, which is essentially what do we do now?

Corey's book is full of policy recommendations and ideas about the future and ways that things can get better, but there's not a lot in the book that is like pointing you in the face and being like, here is what you should do. And I wanted to know if there's anything that I can do and you can do to change this and make sure it doesn't happen again and to see how we can build a better internet together, if that's even possible. So that's most of what Corey and I talked about. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too.

Let's do it. Corey Doctor, welcome back to the Vergecast. It's been a minute. Thank you very much, David Pierce. It has been a minute. I'm glad to be back. Last time you were here, we yelled about printers together. We got a lot of feedback about that episode,

and now I feel like we get to take that thing and sort of blow it up to the size of the universe, and I'm very excited about it. Excellent. Me too. So I want to spend very little time talking about, like, the premise of inshittification, in part because you were just on Decoder,

or other podcasts that I generally refuse to talk about. And you did a very good job sort of running through, I think, how it works. And I want to build on that more than anything. But I just want to do sort of two minutes of level setting here. Sure. And the first is, talk to me about the word in shittification. I haven't seen anybody ask you if having this thing has become a phenomenon. Was it the right word?

Like, I'm sure you didn't imagine it was going to be this thing when you first use the word in shittification. Is it the right word? Is it still the right word? Yeah, I think so. Look, I, first of all, I'm a science fiction writer. So I coined me eulogisms like Antsbilled Hills. And also, I'm a tech activist.

I've worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm in my 24th year now. So for most of my adult life, I'm 54 years old. And that job is a job of getting people to care about things that are quite abstract and technical until they're not, at which point is kind of too late. it's a little like climate change, right? We're like, sure, everyone starts to understand what CO2 means and a greenhouse gas is when there's a wildfire outside their door and a zoonotic plague that's locked them in the house that's on fire. But it would be really nice if we could do something about it before then. And so I've spent like most of my adult life coming up with parables, analogies, funny words, framing devices, whatever.

And so I'm quite pleased with the legs that this word has. I'm also quite pleased to see it being used loosely. So there's a cohort of people who are quite adamant in defending my honor by telling other people off if they use inshittification in a non-technical sense. And I really wish they'd cut it out. I see it the other way where like any bad thing that ever happens to anyone anywhere is now about inshification. Oh, I'm happy to see that, right? So my first two languages were English and Yiddish, which are both like, you know, glorious mongrel languages that have. steal vocabulary from other languages and use them loosely and so on. So I'm really happy to have

my word used very loosely indeed, not only because it gives me a little ego boo, but also like tactically, if 10 million people use the word loosely and one million normies look it up, that's a million people I just never would have reached. And then the word itself, I think is quite fun. You know, in the American Dialect Society made it their word of the year. They, they had linguists actually like talk about how it decomposes, which, you know, I have to say like I, I don't have a background in linguistics at all. And barely have a background in grammar. I went to weird alternative schools. We never got any formal grammar instruction. I learned English by ear the way most native speakers in most languages do. And it was very interesting to hear them decompose it,

break it down. I do think that prefix N implies both something that is underway and something that is maybe intentional. And so I quite like the way that that plays out. And then the one other thing I'll say is that I've had some colleagues say, well, I wish you'd chosen a word that didn't have a swear in it. I was just about to ask if the swear is a feature or a bug here. So obviously it's a feature, right? People love to cuss. And so the word is getting more usage than it would because it makes some people go teahy to say the word fit. But also like, this friend was like, you know, he's a security expert. He's like, well, I can't use this word in an address to a bunch of NATO generals. I'm like, well, dude, first of all, I'm pretty sure that NATO generals have heard the word shit. But second of all, if you've got a better word, like, you know, go off King. Like, like I have come up with a million words. None of them ever spread the way this one did. So yeah, by all means, do something better and I'll happily use it, right? Like this is not my, my glory doesn't come from having a word. that's on other people's lips. My glory, if it ever comes, will come from having made a difference in the world.

That's fair. I buy it. My only note would be it doesn't sort of transpose into other parts of speech very well. Like you use the word insidificatory a bunch. Oh, I love that. No, no, no, no, no, no. And I will say, listening to you say it in the audio book is spectacular. You're very good at saying it. But boy, is that a hard word to figure out. It makes it fun. It makes it fun. We're in the inshitta scene. There's insidificatory impulses being advanced by inshittifiers. We need to be, disenshitifying and we need to fight the forces of anti-discidification. Like, I never learned Latin, but this makes me feel like I'm learning those complex verb tenses. All right. I love it. I mean, I'm sold. So you've been on this book tour for a while, which means I suspect you have this next part down pat. And this is hopefully the only speech I'm going to make you give that is like a rehearsed speech at this point. But for folks who have not read the book, and everybody should or have seen your stuff on this, walk me through

very quickly the three steps of inshidification, just at the sort of basis. Sure, sure. So the three steps of insidification, that kind of procession of the illness in a firm, is that first you have a platform that is good to its end users while finding a way to lock those end users in stage one. In stage two, because the users are locked in, things can be made worse for those users without risking their departure in order to make things good for business customers. Once those business customers are locked in, you go to stage three, which is harvesting the value both from end users and from business customers in order to deliver it to shareholders and executives until there's no value left in the platform, save for that mingy homeopathic residue needed to keep users locked to the platform and business customers locked to the users. And that's in shittification. And you would say, I think, I think I've seen you say that Facebook is probably your cleanest, perfect example of what that has looked like. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I think, yeah, I tend to agree. I think you could make a case that it's either Facebook or Amazon, but they both feel and in a very sort of mainstream, like in my own day-to-day life,

we have felt that change and I think it's really useful. So I want to spend almost all of our time here talking about what we do about it because I think the thing that is not in the book that I found most surprising is some like raw, raw speech to me the reader about how I should change my life in order to make all of this do better. And like if only this is just a collective action problem that we can all solved together by quitting Amazon, right? That it's like, why at the end of the book is just you being like, here's 10 other stores you can go to that are not the same thing. Why is that not the prescription here? Well, I just don't think you solve systemic problems with individual consumption choices, right? Shopping your way out of monopoly is like trying to recycle your way out of the wildfires,

right? It's just, it's not going to work. You know, these are like, I think if you, you know, the galaxy brain meme where there's sort of three explanations and the brain gets bigger. So, you know, the smallest version is, well, consumers are the secret regulators of the world. We vote with our wallets. We get the outcomes we vote for. If you want to go real neoliberal on this, you could talk about revealed preferences, right? You know, if you say you hate it, but you still shop there, then you must love it. Anyone who sells their kidney in order to pay the rent has a reveal preference for one kidney. And, and, you know, this is like what you get. If you're a neoliberal and you have no theory of power and you just think of things as a bunch of people of equal power bargaining equally among

one another with perfect market information. So that's the tiny brain. The medium brain is, oh, no, it's these like ketamine-addled Zuckermusky and failures who took over these platforms and are really bad. And sure, like there is like a tech oligarch shaped hole in the policy environment, but it would attract any sufficiently terrible tech executive to fill it, right? It's not that Elon Musk is a singular genius. It's just that Elon Musk is uniquely suited to fill the Elon must shape hole in our environment. And there's plenty of people who are nearly as good. And if, like, he overdoses on ketamine tonight, there'll be a succession battle among 10 big balls. And whoever ends up sitting in his chair tomorrow will be indistinguishable from him. So if you really want to think about

what's going on here, you have to think about this in shittogenic policy environment, right? The choices that I hope the book actually really does reveal for readers, the policy decisions that are quite concrete and have a really clear bright line from making this decision to these firms going sour on us, right? When we say, okay, well, we're going to let you buy your competitors. So there's nowhere for your users to go. We make it easier for the platforms to treat us worse. When we say we're going to change IP law so you can block reverse engineering. So if people still want to use the part of your platform that's good, they can't block the part of your platform that's bad. We invite them to make the part of their platform that's bad worse in order to make themselves richer. So it's frustrating because it would be really

nice if you could just like have seven weird tricks or 11 beneficial companies and like you know by all means if you think twitter sucks and is bad for your mental health and you'd rather be on you know blue sky or master it on whatever like go off but like that's not gonna it's not gonna fix the problem it just might make your life a little better which you know not a terrible goal but you know at the same time this is a thing from zephyr teach out's great book break them up if there's a big demonstration down at the amazon warehouse and you miss it because you don't want to buy your markers from And so you drive around for two hours looking for an artisanal stationer to buy your markers out to make your protest sign.

You miss the protest. Amazon won, right? So, like, don't worry too much about your consumption choices. Do what is nice. Like, buy from the people you like who you want to keep in business. Buy from the shops in your neighborhood if you can, right? Like, do all of that stuff. But, like, organize yourself around, like, political change.

That's the thing you should be devoting your energy to. So, you know, Electronic Frontier Foundation, we have this national network of activist groups, the Electronic Frontier Alliance. If you go to eFA.ff.org, you can find groups in your town that are working on everything from like digital abortion privacy to, you know, drone regulation, to, you know, ending the use of digital technology for ice raids to write to repair legislation at the state level or right to repair rules for domestic procurement. So like your town's not going to buy cars for its motor pool unless they don't have DRM on the engine, so any mechanic can fix it. That's how make a systemic difference. It's not

by like shopping really hard. I mean, I think I agree with the spirit of that, but it does feel like there is something to the idea of like, if not voting with your wallet, then sort of voting with your feet in some

ways, right? Because I think a point you make in the book that I think is very true and that we don't necessarily talk about enough is that there is this constant push and pull between I hate being on Twitter and there There are people of incredible value to me on Twitter. Right.

And so it's like if you could all at once sort of engineer the network effects to be like, we're all today going to leave Twitter, you could make a lot of real progress on a sort of person by person. What website do I go to today? It's just that doing that is impossible. Right? And I think the thing that we've seen, like this is where Cambridge Analytica comes up for me all the time. It's like that was the moment that I think, frankly, even more than was rational, everybody

lost their minds about meta. Sure. I don't believe in Cambridge and Helena because marketing hype, but I do think that they're terrible for making that hype and for selling it to other people. Right. And it was like it was very, it got people up in arms about a specific platform in a way that I really have never seen before or since. And yet everybody stayed on Facebook. And so that was the moment where I was like, okay, this idea of sort of suddenly we're all going to leave may just be irrelevant. But then I come to things like Amazon where like Amazon, where like Amazon, has no, my friends are not on Amazon in some way that is like important and meaningful to me.

It's pretty easy to pick up and leave Gmail. So I think like you talk a lot about sort of the switching costs of a lot of these things, but I do wonder there are some things that it feels like it ought to be pretty easy for me to buy toilet paper from somewhere else, right? Like why, why isn't it worth pushing people harder to do that? I just think that like there's a limited number of hours in the day and a limited number of things that people can care about. And, you know, making, making your own life a lot harder to eke out a very, very small incremental advantage.

You know, one of the problems with Amazon is that because we're again very lax about enforcing antitrust, we let them corner a bunch of markets and force a lot of firms out of business. They sort of finished what Walmart started, right? And it is very hard not to shop on Amazon. And like you can, right? If it's your, if your hobby is finding places to shop that are in Amazon, then you can probably assemble a pretty good list. Maybe someone could make things easier. But I'm, you know, call me a solutionist, but I'm interested in how technology could solve this.

So in the case of Amazon, I don't know if you've ever seen there's these browser plugins you can get that if you're looking at a book on Amazon, because ISBNs are a completely standard identifier, it'll put a reserve this at your local library button in the place of the buy-in on Amazon button. Oh, I love that. Really cool, right? So ASINs, right, the stockkeeping units that Amazon uses, they represent an uncopyrightable database. Databases don't attract a copyright. And in theory, you could start a co-op in your town or that helps produce software that works with like the four giant point of sale apps that exist today in the market because this is one of the weird things about monopolies is that oftentimes the solutions are a little easier, at least as a technical. nickel matter because everything is the same. So imagine now you've got neighborhood co-ops that are just like data co-ops that allow you to list your inventory in a database that translates UPCs to

ASINs. And then whenever you're on Amazon shopping, it just says like buy it at the corner store if it's there. Right. And like you could imagine something very similar for Uber, right? Where like the one of the problems with a co-op platform for gig riders is that there's a kind of chicken kind of egg problem. Why would a passenger install an app when there's no drivers who have the app? Why would a driver install the app and there's no passengers install the app? But what if instead, like when my phone fires off a request to Uber and your phone accepts it, both of our phones are running another app that uploads the details of that as like hashes to a server? And if it detects that we both have the co-op app, it tears down the Uber ride and rebuilds it as a co-op ride.

So all this stuff is like technically possible. It's just illegal. It's illegal because this reverse engineering violates Section 12-1 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans most forms of reverse engineering. And I want to say, by way of closing the loop on this, Facebook never organized and everyone leave Myspace Day. What Facebook did was gave everyone on Myspace who wanted to go to Facebook, a scraper, a bot. You gave that bought your login and password, and it went to Myspace several times a day pretending to be you. It grabbed all the messages in your MySpace feed and it put them in your Facebook feed. so you can reply to them and then to push them back out to MySpace. So, you know, there is the, you've said organizing the everybody lead Facebook day is impossible,

but it might also be irrelevant, right? Maybe we don't need that, right? Maybe we can just change the insidogenic policy environment so that we can do onto Mark Zuckerberg as Mark Zuckerberg did unto Rupert Murdoch when he owned MySpace. Right. And the difference to your point is that since then Facebook and others have worked very hard to make it illegal to do that thing. They did it and then they pulled up the ladder behind.

Yeah. It's this kind of mesh woven of IP law interpretations and contracts that make, you know, modifying a thing you own illegal if it's bad for the shareholders, the company that made it. And we see that in right to repair a lot with like things like tractors and we see it with printers that we talked about before. And we see it with service design. We see it with, you know, the stuff that's here now. Okay. So the thing about a lot of what you just described is that there's this like, kind of. that I've always found really interesting, and all the, like, designers on Twitter are always talking about this. And they're like, oh, embrace friction, right? Like, it is actually good to make your life a little bit harder. And I think, I find the argument very compelling that we as a society have accepted everything in order to get slightly more convenience. That, like, we, we, we, we, we, anything that makes something faster or easier for us, we will do and we'll figure out all the downstream consequences later. And so the idea that actually, like, you should go out of your way to make life harder, I find very compelling in a sort of, like, you know, meditative way. And

I also think it's practically impossible. It's just not how anyone lives their life. Like, you're very hard pressed to find somebody who's going to, like, deliberately choose the harder way to do just about anything. I mean, look, if you choose the friction of shopping really hard or, like, trying really hard to get off Facebook or whatever, then you lose the time for the friction of making sourdough with your five-year-old. Right? Like, it's zero sum. I'm not, I'm not like saying everything should just be like, as I used to say in the 70s, a zipless fuck, right? But I am saying that you should choose where your friction is.

You can't have friction for everything, right? Right. Right. But I think the thing that seems true, or at least has pretty much always been true, is that the big, huge, all-encompassing nightmare hellscape surveillance platforms are the easiest ones and the best ones to use. They are like, it is faster to make a Twitter account than to make a Mastodon account. And part of me wonders, like, is there something structural about the better way that is just always going to be a little harder and a little worse?

Or is it just that no one has ever been able to or has successfully tried? So I'm interested in this. I mean, we're getting into the weeds now with Mastodon and Twitter design, right? So I don't think actually these days, it's been a while since I set up a Mastron account. I don't think it's actually harder than setting up a Twitter. account except to the extent that you might want to choose a different server than the one that they default you into. I think what they do now is they like to suggest to serve. But even the existence of that choice is harder than making a Twitter account. So you don't have to know about it, right? You can

just go to Mastodon and ignore the fine print that says other servers are available. All right, you can just go default, default, default. I think the thing that is harder is the algorithmic suggestions because they don't exist in Mastodon. So Mastodon a state of nature has like when you open an account de novo, you don't see anything. Except for like, people on your home server. I actually just set up a pixel fed account. So pixel fed is like Instagram but runs on activity pub. And I have this problem. I subscribe to like 25 people and they're okay, but they're not great. And, uh, and then, um, I've been trying to find other people to subscribe to. I look at like my home server feed. I look at the universal feed and I look at the

and it's just not as good. And so if there was a way to get recommendations, I would probably take it. Now, there was a way that people were finding really easy to go to mastodon at one point, which was when the Twitter API existed, you could just run a like a little app that found all the people that you followed on Twitter that had a master an account just signed up to them. That's a thing that we cut off. So if we want to talk about like a policy prescription here,

there's a thing built into Activity Pub, which is the protocol masterdom runs on, where if you want to change servers, you click a link in your account settings or your profile, and it dumps out a little text file that has everyone you follow, everyone who follows you, your mutes and your blocks, all that stuff. And if, and if you sign up for another server, it's going to, it asks you like, are you coming from another server? And you say yes,

and you move that file there. And then all that stuff moves over. So it's like when you're switching from like Verizon to T-Mobile, you do like five minutes administrative work and your phone number pops over. No one cares which network you're on. No one calls a friend and says, dude, you would not believe who sim is in my phone today. Right. It's just, just irrelevant. And we can talk about friction being a big deal. But I'll tell you what, when number porting came in with cell phones, it really did change the competitive nature of that market. It's why we have all these V&MOs, right? You know, these Ryan Reynolds phone company and whatever, right? It's because you can now really easily switch them on carriers. And so if we said as a policy matter, the legacy platforms,

Facebook, Twitter, maybe TikTok, have to provide you with a file that lets you, follow all the people that you were following on Twitter when you move to Mastodon or blue sky or anywhere else, right, because it's a standard protocol. Anyone could support it. And show the messages that you post to them if they're still following you. If we made that, not only would that go a long way to resolving that issue, make it really easy to go from one place to another, but it would also be really easy to enforce. And so unlike, say, a hate speech rule, which is one of the things we've tried to do to make places like Twitter more viable. We have it in Canada, Australia, Europe, they've got various harmful content rules. The UK has just got this new online harms act and so on.

Leaving aside all the other questions, right, about whether it's a good idea or bad a day. If you like the idea of a hate speech rule, you still have to agree on what hate speech is. You have to evaluate every accusation of hate speech to see if it satisfies your definition. You have to do a technical investigation to see whether the platform has taken reasonable steps to avert that hate speech incident. And this is like a seven-year fact-intensive, deep investigation that you have to do for something that happens a hundred times a minute on these platforms. Meanwhile, if you just say, like, you can leave. You can leave. It's really easy.

If you go, you still follow all the people that you were following. They all follow you. It's like the work of a few seconds. You know, you resolve a seeming paradox, right? The paradox I alluded to at the start here, this reveal preference paradox, which is like, why would a member of a disfavored minority you have, faces endless harassment and hate speech on Twitter, stay on Twitter. Well, it's because the only thing worse than being a member of that disfavored minority and being showered in abuse is being a member of a disfavored minority, showered in abuse

and being isolated from your community. Right. So let them go. Let people go somewhere else. Just like, let's not rely on Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk being better at being the unelected absolute dictator of people's social media lives. Let's just abolish that job. Yeah.

I mean, I think the only thing that comes to mind for me there is that that way you're thinking about it sort of assumes there is good stuff on the other end, if only it were easy for us to get there. And this is where I come back to like, why isn't anybody building the better products? Oh, because people can't leave. Right. I do wonder, that is like back to chicken and egg problems, right? It's like I think the hardest part of, like I am, you know, we could spend forever talking about how terrific I think the Federer is his. and I'm going to try very hard not to do that while we're sitting here. But I think the thing that is so frustrating to me about the Fedaverse is that no one has yet quite built the thing.

And everything I hear from people is like, well, nobody's going to build the thing because there's no business in building the thing because how on earth are you going to? Yeah. You just can't do it. There's no business in competing with these because it is a mix of illegal and impossible. Yeah. And if we so, and I guess your argument to be that's why we have to start with the policies. But that requires confidence on your side that if we even if we just sort of removed the gate that suddenly there is this like huge latent supply of great stuff that would immediately come to exist and solve the problem. So I mean, look, I don't know that the platforms management always knows what's best for their own firms.

But they sure act like if you made it possible to go, you would leave. Right. I agree. You know, this is an argument that comes up a lot with right to repair. you know, there's the kind of no true Scotsman version of the Apple fanboy, which is just like no one who owns an iPhone wants to use a third-party app store or take their phone anywhere but an Apple store to get it fixed. It's like, wow, if that were true, it would seem like Apple wouldn't need to spend tens of millions of dollars making sure that you done a lot of work you didn't need to do

in that case. Yeah. Yeah. And so like maybe they're, I mean, sure, they might be making some foolish choices there and misallocating their capital. But I don't think it's the case. I think that we should take them at their word. I think that they do understand that people would want to go. You know, the Berlin Wall was said by the comissars of the German Democratic Republic was said to be there to keep people out of the Soviet socialist utopia and not to keep people in. And yet they sure act like the reason the wall was there is to keep people in. I also think that there's like a growing geopolitical case outside of the U.S. to get off American platforms. And, you know, you. And, you, you know, You know, you have this effort now in Europe called Eurostack, tons of capital going into cloning American services because Donald Trump has made it really clear that America doesn't have trading partners. It doesn't have allies. It has rivals. And those rivals will be neutralized with American tech companies. So when the International Criminal Courts chief prosecutor swore to a warrant against Bibi Net and Yahoo for genocide, Trump denounced it. And then Microsoft terminated his outlook account. And the chief prosecutor of the ICC lost all.

of his email archives, his address book, his calendar, and access to all the working files of of the international criminal court. And I think a lot of policymakers in Europe were like, oh, wait, we need to do something about this. And then the German regulators asked Microsoft, hey, just to be clear, if an American spy agency asks you for access to a European data repository on a server stored in Europe, you're not going to give it to them, right? And they were like, oh no, we'll probably give it to them and we won't tell you and we may not ask for a warrant. And so there's just like a very strong case for getting the hell off of these platforms. And I think as they build these duplicate platforms, they're going to run up against a wall,

which is that there's no way for people to get their data out. Right. Like no one's going to copy and paste a million documents out of a ministry into, you know, from Outlook or G-Dox into like a Eurostack equivalent. you need to be able to like run virtual phones in a cloud and autopilot an app and you need to be able to like jailbreak things and do on device bridging and and scrape and like all this other stuff that's the only way we're going to get data out of it it's a very honorable tradition people have been doing this with online services like since the IBM 360 it's a totally reasonable thing to say that people who have their data on one platform should be able to take it to another platform without the first platform's permission or cooperation it's nice if they do that they don't you shouldn't have to rely on it and And I liken it to, like, the EU observing a housing crisis in East Germany and then building a lot of great housing in West Germany. And then being like, well, why is no one moving into this great housing? Right.

Eventually, you have to look over at that wall, notice it, and tear it down. All right. We got to take a break. And then we're going to get back to Corey Doctro. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at Compto. companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS,

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to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. a.ai slash vergecast. All right, we're back. Let's just dive right back in with Corey Doctro. Here guys.

I've become sort of fascinated by the local first software movement and apps like this app obsidian where it's like the thesis behind these things is what I have is a folder full of text files and what you provide

is a way to manipulate that folder full of text files. But there's still a bunch of text files on my computer. And that is such a complete 180 degree inversion of how we think about most software now that is like what actually happens is I am logging into something that is at a data center very far away. And I think like we're talking, you know, not that long after this huge AWS failure.

And one of the things that fascinates me about those is everybody then has this moment of like, oh my God, none of my stuff is mine. All of my stuff is somewhere else. Sure. And you have this visceral moment of like, I get on my computer and I don't have anything that I think is like those moments are very eye opening to people. But like, is there a way we can start to solve this stuff in product by just being like, like Tim Bernersley, I know talks about this with the solid protocol stuff. And I think that is like an interesting idea that I haven't seen anyone other than Tim Bernersley talk about.

But this idea that like we have to start from a new premise of whose data is whose and where. And if we can build different software on top of it, maybe that. starts to solve some of this problem too. I just think you end up with this problem of how you get the data out, right? And how you manage the awkward transition. Because, right, if we're going to go back to friction, that's the source of friction. There's a little bit of friction in like learning to use a different app, right? Being like, oh, you know, Adobe, one of the stories I tell in the book is like Adobe decided

it didn't want to keep paying the license fee for Pantone and decided to shove it off onto Adobe customers. So you're going to have to suddenly pay $21 bucks a month for the rest of your life to see the pantone colors in your own files. Including all of your old files. What was it black pixels? Yeah, they would go black if you didn't pay $21 a month. And you know, you go like, okay, I'm going to download all my files and I'm going to learn to use the Gimp.

Right. But like you've, that's a little bit of friction, right? Learning some new key combinations and stuff. The real friction is like getting all the data out, reworking all your workflows, collaborating with other people, you know, like you think about like G. docs, the value of G-Dox isn't editing in a browser. It's editing with other people in a browser. Yes. So how do you move all that stuff over? How do you maintain the permissions? You know, all of that stuff is the source of friction. We need to, we need to address that part. I'm all for

like holding things locally. Actually, you're reminding me, we gave a presentation 20 years ago at the O'Reilly OS10Con about now that the Mac is a Unix machine, here's a really easy way to build an iMap server on your own computer. Oh, interesting. And you can pop your mail into like an inbox file. And then you can use any mail client you want with IMAP pointed at your hard drive. And so you can like use mail. Dot app for reading and composing. You use Thunderbird for searching. You can use Pine for something else, right? Like it's the apps are really small and the repos there. And depending on how you like configured it, you wouldn't necessarily have to make multiple copies of your And, you know, it's very cool.

And you could even imagine having like two iMaps, right? One on the, one in the cloud, one on your computer. Those two are kept in sync. And then you've got five pop clients on your computer. If you want to use them, use them for different reasons. Right. Like all of that's like fine. You know, maybe that maybe there are people listening to this or going, well, that's insane.

But if you're like me and you live in email and I absolutely live in email, then you have a lot of archives. You have a lot of workflow recorded. and, like, you know, as you say, like a folder full of text files in your hard drive is a very powerful repo that lots of different programs can act on. And one of the nice things about a folder full of text files on your hard drive is that we have some very standard utilities like our sync that will keep them connected to something else that you can do encrypted syncs with. And that allows you to have like a hybrid world where you can access your files remotely and or even do things like, you know, leave your laptop at home, take a burner when you go across a board. order and configure the iMAP server. So this is a thing that Google used to do when Googlers probably still do. When Googlers had to go to China, they would give you a burner and it would only access

like the last three days of your IMAP and not like the whole spool. And you just like your IT department wouldn't let you look at that file. So if Chinese authorities made you unlock your laptop at the border, you just handed it to them. I have a friend who used to go to China for Google quite a lot. And he says that when he got back, the Chromebook would just go in a shredder because they would just assume that it had been compromised in his hotel room or whatever. Wow. That's, that's wild. We're going to have to talk more about that some other time. Sure. But I think,

like, as you talk about that, it just makes me think, again, we're in this place of like, how much is it is the onus on me to sort of think differently about what I'm doing versus should all of this stuff just work better? And I think, I think you're of the mind of all of this stuff should work better. I think it's easy for you to think differently if everything works better. Yeah. You're right. It's like it's very hard to imagine the thing that doesn't exist and that isn't in the world. I've been going back and back and back to Larry Lessig's code and other laws of cyberspace, which is just still such an important work, talks about these four forces that regulate our world. There's code law norms and markets, right?

So code things that are technologically possible can happen, right? It sounds very tautological, but like you can pass a law requiring the repeal of gravity, but if no one's built an anti-gravity engine, it doesn't matter what the law says. So you can't really, like, ban or mandate the use of a technology that doesn't exist. Or you can ban it, but it doesn't matter, right? Banning time machines doesn't matter.

And when things are profitable, it's easier to get them legalized. And once they're legalized, if they are profitable, it's harder to ban them. And once things are normative, right? Once things are, like, considered reasonable, it's harder to ban them and it's easier to legalize them and it's easier to sell them. So you have these things kind of going around and around and cyclically reinforcing themselves.

Yeah, by all means, like let's have a norm that says asking someone to use Facebook to book the kids a little league for, for, you know, the carpools is like asking someone to like sit in the smoking area to plan, you know, the little league thing. Sure, normative. Yes. Fine, right? Clip that, put it on social media. Yes. That is how everyone should treat Facebook groups about anything. Yeah, but at the same time, like, look, there's a wonderful person called Andrea Downing, who runs a nonprofit called The Like Collective. And Andrea is a breast cancer pre-viver. So this means that she has the gene for breast cancer. And she's part of a group on Facebook for this. And they were lured to Facebook. They were courted by Facebook in the early 2010s when Facebook actively went around to different medical communities online and said, come on Facebook. We have all these features for you that'll make things better for you. And being a breast cancer proviver, pre-viver is a very medically.

consequential and socially important thing, right? So you're making a bunch of choices like, should I have my uterus, my ovaries, and my breasts removed. You're also dealing with the sickness and death of your daughters, your sisters, your aunts, your grandmothers, your mothers, right? So this is like a really important group to these people. And Andrea, not a security researcher by training, but she was poking around on Facebook one day and noticed that you could enumerate the full membership of every Facebook group, even if you weren't a member of it, including her group, which obviously this is a bad thing. So she tells Facebook about it. She files a bug report, and they won't fix it. They said, oh, no, no, that's part of the ad tech stack. It's a feature,

not a bug. So they sued Facebook. And when the FTC under Obama settled all claims outstanding against Facebook with a big fine, they settled this case. And they're still on Facebook, right? And they're still on Facebook because as much as they hate Mark Zuckerberg and the way that he runs that platform, they love each other and are important to each other in a way that outstrips it. And yet they are still hamstrung by this collective action problem. Right. So, you know, like, yeah, let's say, like, we should all get off the platform. But once we make it easy to leave, right, like, if you could go to Blue Sky or Mastodon and see the messages in that Facebook group and reply to them, people would trickle out. And if we make it easier for people to go, the people for whom things are intolerable will

leave. And then maybe the company that's running the firm will, or the service, rather, will get the message and make things more tolerable for the people they haven't lost, or maybe what'll happen to them is what happened to Rupert Murdoch in MySpace, which is that we'll double tap it and stuff it in the shallow grave it deserves to be in. Which is a pretty solid outcome in a lot of cases. It's a great outcome. Who cares, right? It's not the Mona Lisa.

We don't need to preserve it forever. It's fine. So long as the people can leave, right? Like the demise of LiveJournal is fine. The destruction of the communities on LiveJournal is a trash. If we could have gotten rid of Live Journal, which was like, and you know, it's still around as part of V-Contact, but which is like, which was like under management that manifestly was not suited to continue running the live journal. If we could have got rid of that, had gotten rid of that and kept the communities, that would have been the best of all outcomes. Yes. And I think to the extent that you, like, if you wanted to pick one single solution that solves that, it's let us move the communities. I totally agree with you on that. And I think, I mean, the step beyond that even then is like, this is where you get real.

Fedaversy where it's like actually it shouldn't the community should just be the size of the internet and we should not like I shouldn't even have to know what platform you're on. But that I think is like that's yet another sort of product bridge that we're going to have to figure out. I don't care which email client you use, right? Like we I don't care what browser you use.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't care what phone carrier you use. Exactly. We have solved this problem before. Yeah. Okay.

So I'm curious. I want to talk a little bit on the sort of flip side, which is like from the product makers side. And I think you bring up a couple examples in the book of companies doing things that are somewhere between delightful and disliked by major platforms and illegal, but they're doing it anyway. Tell me about this company, Pera, that's doing really fascinating stuff on top of DoorDash, that I think is a pretty good example of a lot of the possibilities of what you're talking about. Yeah, so Pera, it started off as an app to help DoorDash drivers not get cheated by the platform. So the way the DoorDash platform would dispatch a job to a driver is they would expose the base pay, but not the tip. And the tip was like the majority of compensation.

Like oftentimes the base pay would be like a buck 50 and the tip would be 10 bucks. And you wouldn't find out what the tip was until you clocked on the job. So it was like a blind box, right? It was like a slot machine. And if you saw the total pay for the job, and then you changed your mind and you canceled the job and you did that too often, you'd get taken off the app because you were booking jobs and then canceling them. So it turns out DoorDash wasn't very good at this. And the JSON object that they transmitted to your phone just had the tip and the clear text. And so they were just like hiding it with CSS on the page basically.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cool. So, yeah, so, so Pera was just an app that extracted that value and, and showed you an overlay that was like, this is an $11 job, this is a $1 job. And you know, from, from DoorDash's perspective, you can think about it this way. Like, if you as a customer can lowball the tip and still get a delivery, then you will be more likely to be a DoorDash customer, right? And if no drivers clock on because the tip is too small and DoorDash doesn't want to lose you as a customer, they have to take some of the junk fees. They've taken. off of the customer and give it to a driver. So if they can just blind that transaction until after it's been locked in, then they can just take more value from drivers for themselves. Which is like pure stage three in shittification. Absolutely.

That is exactly what that is. Yeah, yeah, 100%. So they rolled this out. DoorDash accused them of stealing driver's social security numbers, which is amazing because if your DoorDash app is storing your social security, number, that's bad. Yeah, if I can get it from DoorDash, we have a real big problem. Yeah, and empirically, it wasn't happening.

And because you could see what the app was doing. And then they threw 40 full-time engineers at it, and they eventually, like, basically crushed it. But partly the reason they crushed it, I think, is that Perra couldn't raise the capital to hire 80 engineers because there was this, there was, there were all these legal threats hanging over to where it was, it was quite a capital risk. So DoorDash these days, what they want to do is pry open multiple offers from all the gig platforms on your phone and then let you figure out which one you're willing to take based on the one with the highest compensation. And one of the things if you've never done work on a gig platform that people don't always appreciate is that you get an offer and you only have a few seconds to decide whether to take it.

And you know how like if you go to the grocery store, they put unit pricing on the shelf. So, you know, the raisins are like four bucks, but they're three cents a gram or whatever, three cents an ounce. You don't get that breakdown. So you don't see what your mileage and your minutes are being paid. You just see a total. You have to try and do that math in your head. And you can imagine like if you're a dasher and an Uber driver and a Lyft driver and you're also doing like three other kinds of delivery work on your phone, it might be really hard to do the sums. in your head. And so one of the things that Perra can do is just normalize those values and show you

like a true unit cost for this, right? Which like again, like it's very weird that we would try and make it illegal for a worker to know the unit costs of their labor offer, right? Like this whole argument for piecework, which, you know, allows the firms bidding out the piecework to avoid insurance and overtime and whatever is that the seller of the labor can make their own choice, that it's paternalistic to make the choice for them. Okay, but I don't think it's paternalistic to say doing a whole bunch of algebra in your head in real time while driving a car is a thing that most of us can't do. And like maybe we should have a computer do that for you, you know?

Computers are pretty good at that. Yeah. So the reason I bring this up is because my sense throughout the book is this is this is the sort of thing you'd like to see a million of across every possible platform. Like you talk a lot about, you know, jailbreaking and the concept of adversarial interoperability. And it's like, what, until we get these big policy swings, like what we, what we need is to just poke and prod at every available piece. Well, and to get the policy swings. Well, right. I guess we need the one to make that legal again. And then, but then the way to pry this open is not to,

like build another Amazon, it's to just tear Amazon into a thousand pieces with a thousand different kinds of apps, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't you know what Jeff Bezos said when he started the business, your margin is my opportunity. Right. Right.

So just raid their margins. And I think this is like back to geopolitics, right? So Canada's response to the tariffs like a lot of countries has been retaliatory tariffs, which is another way of saying things in Canada now cost more because we import a lot of finished goods from America. also we have to drink shitty rye instead of delicious bourbon. Right. And it is a lot of like cell phones in the name of geopolitics.

Yeah. It's a very weird way to punish America, right? This is like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbor says, Ouch. Meanwhile, we could consume the accumulated monopoly rents of these tech platforms that have been extracted from Canadians and other people in the world and not only realize a consumer surplus for these goods are cheaper, but we could create export markets for disinshitifying software. Right.

And that stuff that everyone in the world would want. And if Canada doesn't do it, someone else will. So there's this kind of interesting equilibrium where if anyone defects, that defector, the first defector, reaps a huge benefit. And all the subsequent defectors reap a much smaller benefit, right? So consuming the accumulated monopoly rents of American tech platforms as fuel for a single-use rocket to boost Canada's tech sector, which used to be very big. We used to have a company that made all the world smartphone.

phones called Research in Motion, right, to boost that into a stable orbit on a better cash basis, right? Because selling app stores for iPhones that loot the $100 billion per year transaction fee business that Apple takes out of the iPhone without incurring the hardware costs that Apple is bearing, that is a very good opportunity. That margin could be our opportunity. And if we don't take it someone else well, and if that's not enough, if you remember when, those Russian soldiers looted those Ukrainian tractors. And they were all low jacked by John Deere and they showed up in Chechnya. And then the John Deere dealership in Kiev bricked the tractors.

And everyone was like, ha, ha, dumb looters, you get your comeuppance from John Deere. Well, it does mean that Donald Trump could order any country's tractors immobilized, right? So there's like a geopolitics case for this. This is what we were told that Huawei was going to do to our critical infrastructure. and it's what American tech companies have done to the world's critical infrastructure. And I say that, first, because it's scary and bad in an era of Trumpism, but second, because as Putin showed us after invading Ukraine and accelerating the European transition to solar by 15 years in five, when the devil's at the door, a lot of the things that used to seem like

burdens you could never hurdle or bury. years you can never hurdle are suddenly things that you can just jump over with ease. They're just not that big a deal. You know, the U.S. Trade Representative says, well, unless you have these IP laws, we're going to hit you with tariffs, and then they hit you with tariffs, right? Well, like, someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as they say, and then you do it, and then they burn your house down. You're kind of a sucker if you keep doing what they say. So I'm quite excited by this moment, like not about Trump broadly, but about this specific thing that this thing I've worked on for a quarter of a century and more than half my adult life is actually closer to being realized,

I think, like having, has a more fertile soil to grow than at any time. And as Americans, we're going to be able to import those tools because, you know, if you've got a payment method and an internet connection, you can download jailbreaking tools. You know, it's easier than getting cheap insulin from Canada, getting good software from Canada, you know? Yeah, that was one of the things you said in the book that I thought was really interesting is that, that actually this is a, we're going to have a global solution to an American problem because there is no incentive to play nice in geopolitics right now. Last thing real quick, and then I know you have to go. I couldn't tell throughout the whole book whether you think that under sort of the current conditions,

insidification is essentially inevitable, that if I build a thing that is successful enough that it is inevitably going to go this way because, you know, money and power corrupt the same way that they always do. So I'm curious, like, what you would tell startup founders and people who are like new at this and are saying, I don't, I don't want to, and I want to do a good job and not build a horrible and shitified platform. Is there, is there a way out other than you just like holding their heads in both hands and being like, don't be an asshole? No, you got to, you got to hack your future self. So the Ulysses Pact is named after one of the most important hackers, Ulysses, who. was in this situation where he was going to sail onto the sea of the sirens. And if you heard the siren song, you would jump in the water and drown. And so the accepted protocol was to fill your ears with wax, but he wanted to hear what the sound sounded like because it was probably amazing. So he anticipated his future weakness, and he had his sailors tie him to the mast so that

he could hear the song but not jump in. So a Ulysses pact is anytime you take a course of action off the table and a moment of strength because you anticipate your future moment of weakness. So being strong is not being infallible. It's in fact recognizing your own fallibility. And so if you think about the forces that led to inshittification, right, monopolization, regulatory capture, a weak workforce, the ability to modify products after their sale and make them worse, what you need to do is like create the circumstances where neither the devil on your left shoulder whispering things in your ear nor the VC threatening to pull the plug on you can force you to do something that today seems like a bad idea.

So unionize your workforce so that they can tell you to fuck off if you tell them to insidify things and make it stick. Make all your software irrevocably open source. Create APIs and make sure that at least 51% of your users are API users off platforms.

So if you shut the API down in the future, you go out of business instantaneously. All this stuff may sound like a big lift. It is a big lift, right? But you do this stuff and not even you can, pressure yourself into and shouldifying your product without immediately going out of business. And so that's how you do it. Ulysses taught us how to do it. Now we know. I like it.

All right. Corey, thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. Thanks, David. All right. Thank you again to Corey for being here with us. That was super fun. I learned a ton from that conversation. And I kind of have come to think differently about how I exist on the internet. I've been noodling on that interview for a couple of weeks now. And I think the way that I approach these services is already starting to change. If you want to talk about insidification, if you have thoughts, if you have feelings, get at me. I want to hear all about it. Firstcast to thevers.com, call the hotline.

And speaking of, we're going to take a break and we're going to do a hotline question. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to short-listing candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply.

Flex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm.

We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assess that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things.

One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better

that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.

That's like second. third. That's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig in. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition? And trust me, these money dilemmas

will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged, and I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real,

comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story, listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you are rich BFF. All right. We're back. Vergecast hotline time. The number, as always, 866, Verge 11, the email vergecast at the verge.com. I'm David Pierce.11 on Signal. Get at us. I want to hear all of your questions, all of your thoughts, all the other feeling Z-tech books that you think I should read. I want hear about it. And we got a question about an episode we recorded a couple of weeks ago that I think is like perfectly on brand for this conversation that we're having right now. So let me just play it

right here. Hey, this is Matt from Springfield, Missouri. I was listening to the episode we're discussing how Amazon is in a lawsuit with perplexity. And I actually sell old manuals for machinery on my own personal website, Amazon and eBay. And actually, if I'm seeing an increase in sales from referral links from these AI agents on my personal website. Actually, I would prefer these AI agents, people to stop that way, because then I wouldn't have to spend more time and resources to be diversified on different markets, and I could just keep it on my website. I also sell my products cheap for my website because I don't have to pay for the Amazon and eBay fees. Anyway, that's my two cents. Thanks for the show. I was really struck by this question, because I think that we have come to see

Amazon in particular as like the platform on which you sell stuff, right? And there is this sense that if you can't compete on Amazon, you can't win. Amazon in so many ways has set it up to be that way, right? Like there's an antitrust case against Amazon because of the practices that it used to monitor prices around the internet and actually penalize sellers for having lower prices elsewhere than they had on Amazon. This is the kind of thing that Amazon has done to preserve itself as like the only place that people can reasonably go to shop. The other thing is that it's really hard to make a good shopping experience somewhere else, right? I think Shopify has done a really interesting job of just sort of taking pieces of the puzzle and making it simpler. So now, like, I can have a website, but Shopify handles all of the actual logistics of selling. That's really interesting, right? Like, I think if we can sort of pull the catalog apart, but make all of the logistics centralized, there's something really interesting there. But this is a total inversion of that that is like, okay, what if instead of having a central platform where all this stuff was, we had a central shopper that could go all of the places?

And instead, as a seller, I can have my website and trust that there will be agents and there will be these autonomous bots that come around and find things on my website to buy. Maybe that's a better outcome here. It's at least a very different outcome than this incredible centralization that we've had. And this is something that I hear from the AI people who are web defenders. And to be totally honest, I'm very skeptical of those people. I think it's very hard to think the open web is a good idea and that everything should be intermediated by AI. But there is something to this idea that actually what we need is a new way of finding stuff on the web that is not just about finding stuff, right? Because it's one thing to say, okay, we're going to show you the coolest coat you've ever seen,

but you have to set up an account, you have to enter your credit card details, you have to enter into a relationship with a new company that's going to send you emails all the time, you have to wait weeks because they're not as sophisticated as shipping operation as Amazon or Walmart. So there are a lot of reasons that like just purely logistically and in a convenience sense, it makes sense for everything to have been totally centralized. But if you match this idea of now I have an AI agent that is capable of finding these sort of product needles in haystacks for me with now there are these tools like Shopify that are starting to centralize some of the the like boring grunt work logistics of it all in such a way that it is easy for me to track my

packages is it is easy for me to know my credit card is secure it is easy for me to get things quickly but I don't have to just do it through the one player all that is super interesting right and this is like classic bundling and unbundling Amazon was a complete bundling phase of the internet where it said we're going to take every single piece of the puzzle and we're going to do it all in one place. And what happens when you get a big bundle is people start to just pull parts of that out, right? There's no way that one company can do every single thing the best. And so you take a company like Shopify, not to keep bringing up Shopify, that is like, well, we're going to take a part of this and do it better or differently or more

accessibly to more people. Or you get companies like Walmart who are like, we're going to compete on having this sort of premium bundle that gets you lots of other stuff. There are just a lot of things about Amazon that we're starting to see people pull apart and make better products individually out of. The question then is, what is the thing that knits all of those things together if it's not just another huge Amazon-style platform? Maybe it could be AI. I'm skeptical of AI agents in every single way, including their ability to find good,

interesting products and not just the same products that they would find on Amazon or the products that they have made corporate deals with. But in a world in which there is a truly neutral, truly useful agent that knows what I like, knows the full catalog of the internet and can handle the logistics because there are ways to handle the logistics, that becomes a really fascinating shopping system. And so I think the idea that there are people out there who are saying, I have been selling things and I'm starting to see an uptick on my website, not just on the other platforms that I am forced to play with because of AI agents, that's a huge win. There are lots of complicated downstream effects, but like that thing by itself, I take as a victory. And that's

really interesting. And I think in the sort of in shittification universe, the thing after in shittification is unbundling, right? And I think in a certain tiny small way, this is what that looks like. Anyway, Matt, thank you for calling in. This one sort of broke my brain open in a really fun way, and I appreciate you calling in. Anyway, that's it for the Vergecast. I've got to go finish moving. I've got to stop talking because of this cold

is just going to destroy me, so we're going to get out of here. As always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, other books I should read, feelings about AI agents, tell us everything. 866, Verge11, is the hotline. Vergecast at the verge.com is the email. We want to hear everything from you absolutely all of the time. The Vergecast is Verge production,

and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday with, I don't even know what, a bunch of fun stuff. We're also shooting version history all of this week. I'm going to be in New York, so I'll be in the studio with Nelai for Friday's show.

We have a ton of fun stuff coming up for you. This holiday season of podcasts from The Urge is going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you then. Rock and all.